Articles
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Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the organizational layer into the following areas: Executive, Approaches, and Resources. The organizational layer forms a context that impacts your ability to win bids. But it can’t necessarily be accounted for as inputs to the process. It’s not part of the process flow, but it impacts every step of the process flow. It is roughly analogous to style in writing, only it’s the management style of the environment your process operates in. Your win
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What you should write about? How should you present it? How do you know if it's correct? Before you jump into proposal writing, you need a plan. And you need to validate that plan to prevent rework. Why this goal is important If you think the best way to figure out what to write about in your proposal is to start writing, you may be making a colossal mistake. The mistake is that you’re skipping the part where you “figure it out.” You are thinking by writing about it. Responding to an RFP is not- 0 comments
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Nearly all of the examples of selling in writing that we see in life teach us the wrong ways to write for proposals. From the ads on TV and the junk mail we receive, to the ads in publications. Even the materials handed to us by other companies are written completely wrong for proposals. And yet, when people sit down to write a proposal, they can’t help but emulate what they’ve seen when others try to sell in writing. Even what we learn in school about writing is wrong for proposals. When you wr- 0 comments
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When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves. They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing that they do not matter. The customer who will be making the decision matters far more than you do. A much better way to find your competitive advantage is to focus on what they prefer. A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you ov- 0 comments
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Figuring out what should go into your proposal is the most important part of the proposal process. It usually starts with an Request for Proposals (RFP) that can be intimidating if you don't know how to read it. To prepare your proposal, you need more than an outline or a compliance matrix to figure out what to write. You need to take into consideration the instructions in the RFP, how the customer will evaluate your proposal, what you will offer, and what you know about the customer, opportunit- 0 comments
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To write a proposal, you must overcome eight challenges. You can’t avoid them. You can’t skip any of them. You just have to face them. To help out, we’ve included links to many other articles we’ve written that are relevant to the individual challenges: Complying with the RFP. First you have to read it and understand it. Then you have to cross-reference all the requirements across the various sections. Even if your assignment is for a single section, there may be requirements in other sections t- 0 comments
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It’s not a certain style. It’s not a great layout. It’s not enough time to do proofreading or to have one more draft. It's not even what words you should use. What you need is to know what to write about, the means to make sure it happens, and some way to know if what was written is what you want. What you really need is to: Collect the right intelligence. In order to do the best job of proposing the best outcomes for the customer, you need to have an information advantage. Collecting the right- 0 comments
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Proposal content planning should give a lot of guidance to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to present it. They should be able to follow the content plan like a set of instructions, that they can follow to create the right proposal on the very first draft. You can anticipate many of the things that will need to be addressed in your future proposals, based on the nature of the work that you do and how you manage it. The problem is that unless every RFP really is the same, and not- 0 comments
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Apple is famous for having a designer lead their product development efforts instead of having an engineer lead them. Apple designers obsess over what will please their customers. In many ways that exactly describes what great proposal writers do. So who designs the offering for a company that offers complex services like engineering? Should it be a subject matter expert? Someone who understands the work? Or should it be a designer, someone who understands what will please the customer? Could i- 0 comments
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Most proposals are lost before the RFP is released. When you haven’t discovered what it will take to win and all you have to go by is what’s in the RFP, you are starting from a competitive disadvantage. You want to be the other company. The one that is starting from a competitive advantage. But even when you have staff “looking into it,” “researching it,” “chasing the lead,” “marketing the customer,” or whatever else you want to call it and doing it ahead of RFP release, most companies fail beca- 0 comments
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After you identify what things matter to your customer, you can start exploring how they matter to the customer. Then you can choose what to focus on in your proposal. That’s when you find that you have choices, and those choices are what become your bid strategies. Below we show some of the things that matter to customers, explore how and why they matter, and discuss how you can use them to create bid strategies and competitive advantages, and articulate why the customer should select you. Pric- 0 comments
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When you write a proposal, it should be based on what it will take to win. The challenge with that is that what it will take to win may be different for every bid. You can probably anticipate some of the things that are typically part of what it will take to win, but with every bid there can be differences that matter. Understanding what it will take to win is mostly based on discovering what matters: What matters to the customer? Customers have needs. But they can’t simply go buy what they want- 0 comments
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The things you need to know to determine if a lead is worth pursuing are different from what you need to know to close the sale with a winning proposal. A sales process that qualifies your leads is important. It is also not enough to win. If you are addressing "Should we pursue this" and "Should we bid this" as if they are the same thing in a single meeting, it's a bad sign. Lead qualification is a determination of whether it is worth investing in the pursuit of a business lead. A qualified lead- 0 comments
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It’s hard to get an early start on a proposal, and not just because you don’t know when the RFP will be released. You often get advance notice of RFP releases. When the pursuit is a recompete, you can anticipate the release years in advance. If it's the result of a sources sought notice, request for information (RFI), customer forecast, or other announcement, you may get a notice a month or so in advance. So what do you do? With the time you have available, how can you maximize your win probabil- 0 comments
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Creating proposal graphics can be thought of in two parts. My friend Mike Parkinson of the 24hr Company refers to them as: • Conceptualization. Figuring out what to communicate visually and what the graphic needs to communicate. • Rendering. Drawing the graphic. Rendering is where all the artistic skills are required. But conceptualization is where you figure out what should go into the graphic and what the graphic should accomplish. Conceptualization does not require any artistic abilitie- 0 comments
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Turning the art of winning proposals into a quantifiable science is more possible than most people realize. It requires making data driven decisions. And to do that you have to thoroughly embrace performance measurement for the pursuit process. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The trick to it is to have a process that gives you the data you need without it becoming extra work. One of the things we find when implementing the MustWin Process on PropLIBRAR- 0 comments
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Most proposal writing is good. But not great. Good proposal writing is not competitive. If you want to win consistently you need to write better than good, you need to write better than everyone else. Most proposal writing sounds beneficial. It attempts to make whatever you've got to work with sound good. Most proposal writing shows that the vendor is fully qualified and meets all the requirements. It’s positive. It's good. Unfortunately, good proposal writing is not competitive. Making your com- 0 comments
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When the customer reads your proposal there are many reasons they might decide your proposal is their best alternative and select it for award. The goal of proposal writing is to enable them to reach a conclusion in your favor. Some of the reasons they might do this include: They can trust you to deliver as promised better than any alternative You know what needs to be done and how to do it better than any alternative You bring lower odds of failure or problems than any alternative You are re- 0 comments
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People perform better when they have the right support. Teams of people perform better when their collaboration is coordinated. The proposal process is only part of what is required to optimize the performance of proposal contributors. Proposal management begins with the implementation of a formal process. But that is just the beginning. It is only part of managing what it will take to win. It takes more than defining some steps and telling the proposal team what to do to and on what schedule.- 0 comments
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Companies that want to get better at doing proposals often struggle with their proposal process. They struggle with the steps. They struggle meeting deadlines. They struggle with time management. But mostly, they just struggle. Part of the reason for the all the struggles is their process. It’s not that it needs improvement. It needs replacing. And it’s not just the process that needs replacing. It’s the whole way you look at the proposal process. Proposals are not completed in steps It would be- 0 comments
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